Women’s shelter asks justices to revive law barring abusers from owning guns

A women’s shelter in Houston said its clients began receiving images of their abusers waving guns soon after an appeals court struck down a federal law barring domestic abusers from owning firearms.

The Houston Area Women’s Center said abusers were sending “a message of intimidation without even firing their weapons” and driving their victims to “live in fear of their power.”

The shelter has joined a chorus of voices asking the Supreme Court to step in and revive overturned restrictions aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous or unstable people.

The justices are slated to hear the case during their next term, which begins in October. The case is shaping up as the next critical test of gun rights.

In the 2022 Bruen ruling, the court’s conservative majority vehemently reaffirmed the Second Amendment right of an individual to bear arms and said restrictions must have been contemplated when the amendment was debated and ratified in the late 18th century.

Gun rights supporters hailed the ruling as a victory.

Gun control advocates say it has created a dangerous situation for lower courts as they try to unravel the federal Gun Control Act, which bars gun possession or purchase by felons, fugitives, illegal immigrants, the mentally ill, drug users, and those convicted of domestic violence or are subject to a court restraining order after stalking, harassing or threatening a partner.

Citing the high court’s 2022 ruling, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in March that the restraining order section is unconstitutional.

Women’s rights groups are feverishly working to persuade the justices to overturn the appeals court and restore the law.

“In homes with domestic violence victims, safety means protection from guns. The statistics are staggering, and the Court will be inundated with them,” the Houston shelter told the justices. “There is no debate that people suffering domestic abuse are largely women and children, and that their risk of injury, death, and extreme psychological abuse from threats and coercion, is far greater when their abuser possesses a firearm.”

The center said the nation’s founders retained the right to remove firearms from dangerous people. The center said the same principle should cover those deemed to be threats to domestic partners.

The case that has reached the high court involves Zackey Rahimi, who received a domestic violence restraining order after an ex-girlfriend accused him of assault. He was suspected of involvement in a series of shootings around Arlington, Texas, when officers swooped in with a search warrant and found a rifle and a pistol in his home.

Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Rahimi with possession of a firearm while facing a restraining order.

Mr. Rahimi challenged the indictment.

The 5th Circuit rejected his challenge in 2002. After the Supreme Court issued its Bruen ruling, Mr. Rahimi renewed his challenge and the 5th Circuit reversed its decision.

The circuit judges said the situation would have been different had Mr. Rahimi been convicted of a violent crime. They said a restraining order didn’t preclude Mr. Rahimi from the constitutional right to bear arms.

Judge James C. Ho, a Trump appointee, said the solution is prosecution.

“The power to incarcerate violent criminals is not just constitutionally permissible — it’s imperative to protecting victims. After all, anyone who’s willing to break the law when it comes to domestic violence is presumably willing to break the law when it comes to guns as well,” Judge Ho wrote.

In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration said the lower court misread history.

“Colonial and early state legislatures likewise disarmed individuals who ‘posed a potential danger’ to others,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said.

The Houston women’s shelter said the connection between domestic abusers and guns begs for answers. The shelter said 73% of slayings of domestic partners in Houston from 2019 to 2022 involved guns.

The shelter was part of a wave of interest groups urging the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court’s ruling. Among them were the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Democratic members of Congress.

“Abused victims are precisely the people whom a just government is tasked with protecting. The Second Amendment does not stand as a barrier to their safety,” the bishops said.

Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said data, research and common sense support the shelter’s claims against domestic violence offenders.

“One of the most dangerous demographics to possess firearms is domestic abusers. We have a lot of research that shows people who engage in domestic abuse should not have firearms,” he said.

“They are an especially dangerous group of people. They have a proven track record of being dangerous, and unlike, say, felony convictions, which could be for a nonviolent offense — domestic abuse, by definition, is a violent activity — so prohibiting people with a known propensity to violence is probably a good idea,” Mr. Winkler said.

Steven Schwinn, a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, said the case to ban domestic abusers from possessing firearms exposes the weakness of the high court’s Bruen decision and other precedent protecting Second Amendment rights.

“Using history as the touchstone for Second Amendment rights binds us to, well, history, where certain populations (like DV survivors) get the extreme short end of the stick and where we (as a society) haven’t properly understood serious problems like domestic violence,” Mr. Schwinn said in an email to The Washington Times.

“In other words, the Bruen methodology limits gun regulation to what we understood of social relations in decades and centuries past; it does not account for our modern understanding. And this case illustrates that problem with Bruen as well as any,” he said.

Joseph Blocher, a law professor at Duke University, said the justices may have taken up the domestic violence case so quickly after Bruen because they see a need for clarification.

“I have to think that the justices’ willingness to hear another Second Amendment case so quickly on the heels of Bruen signals their awareness of the chaos in the lower courts and hopefully a willingness to clarify or modify the test accordingly,” he said.

Rahimi’s attorney declined to comment for this report, but his legal team said in a brief to the justices that the bar on firearms ownership went too far.

“This law would have been unthinkable to the founding generation and to most of the Congresses convened in our nation’s history,” the lawyers wrote.

• Stephen Dinan contributed to this report.